Forbidden
“Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.”
-Mark Twain (born 1835 CE)
“We are ever striving after what is forbidden, and coveting what is denied us.”
-Ovid (Born 43 BCE)
Ovid was born 1878 years before Mark Twain, but during those nearly two thousand years, at least one human trait has defied evolution, staying stubbornly constant. The desire for what we can’t have, the obsession with what is forbidden.
Tell kids that cookies are only for special treats, and they will go to astronomical lengths to get and gorge on cookies. But leave the cookie jar free and accessible in the middle of the table and kids lose interest.
It is a commonly known fact that men in relationships get hit on much more frequently than single men. A friend of mine thinks guys who are “off limits” must put out different pheromones.
Dieting only makes you crave the foods that are not allowed more.
And, of course, we here at Love Dub have written extensively about how people will casually break up with a partner only to declare their everlasting love the minute the ex-partner starts a new relationship with someone else.
So why is this back on the table? I was in Cabo for a week of vacation and couldn’t help but notice that the overwhelming themes were alcohol and sex, at least for the high school and college spring breakers that flooded out of hotels and cruise ships every morning to begin another long day of boozing and flirting.
The culture of Cabo and other places like it is saturated with t-shirts emblazoned with mottoes like “Cabo drinking team” and “Wasted in Cabo”. Hosts and hostesses stand at the entrance to their bars starting as early as 7 or 8 in the morning asking if passers by are ready for 2 for 1 drink specials.
This isn’t a column condemning alcohol, and it certainly isn’t a column condemning sex. But I couldn’t help but wonder two things. First, would alcohol be such a central component of young people’s lives if it weren’t forbidden? And secondly, would alcohol be as desired if people were more comfortable with sex?
The first question is probably impossible to answer well. Even in countries without a strict drinking age there are problems with binge drinking by teenagers. But these kids are saturated MTV spring break shows and the like, and it’s hard to tell what the case would be in isolation.
The second question is more interesting. For something so natural and essential, sex is made amazingly complicated by our culture. Parents are embarrassed to talk about it with their kids. Kids (especially girls) grow up thinking masturbation is shameful and sex is bad. Ingenious states like Texas have managed to gain the highest rates of teenage pregnancy through refusing to teach sex education in schools.
And so teenagers are faced with a trifecta. They are incredibly curious about sex, they are totally naïve about it what it’s really all about, and they have few if any sources of information about it. It becomes such a taboo that they only way to approach it is with help. And that help comes in the form of alcohol.
Society puts so many inhibitions on its members when it comes to sex that they only way for people (especially young people) to begin to deal with it is with dis-inhibiting substances.
If people want to have a few drinks, they should be able to do that. And you can make a fairly strong argument that that should apply to people under 21 as well. But the world would be a better place if those who chose to have a drink did so when they felt like it, and not when they desperately needed it in order to (gasp) flirt with a potential partner.
The only way to get there is to stop making sex forbidden, and start getting comfortable talking about it. Type in “forbidden” to Google images and the first 3 pictures that come up are sexual. Hopefully in another couple thousand years we can move those down the list a bit.
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That remark about Texas aggravates me and makes me ashamed; both, interestingly enough because I grew up in Texas. I can tell first hand how bad teenage pregnancies are here ’cause I lived down the street from several of them and at least a dozen girls in my high school dropped out because they came up pregnant. Though, before I get lost in a tangent, I’d like to correct something: Texas does not refuse to teach sex-education, they refuse to teach it properly. Sex-education here is basically imprisoning classes of kids in a dark room and forcing them to watch a video on morality and how you shouldn’t have sex ’till you’re married (what could we expect from the biggest Christian state in the South?) as well as videos and slide shows of what your genitals will look like with an STD; they don’t even mention masturbation except to call it a disgusting practice. I know, I had to sit through it all year after year, though I was lucky enough to have a mother who was more comfortable discussing sex (she never forbid me from anything that wasn’t dangerous to my health, so that could have had some effect on why I didn’t do a lot of stupid s**t (I still did stupid s**t, like getting expelled, but that’s part of being a kid, right?).
Ugh, the restrictions in the US on drugs and alcohol, and the ideas that they are taboo just make people, especially teens, want to try it that much more.
Could we not say the same for illicit drugs? As a teenager I personally got mixed up with Drugs. Looking back now I realize that if I hadn’t been told all my life not to do drugs I would not have been curious about them. Of course now it is irrelevant since I have already gone through that stage in my life, but i still wonder what I would have done had I grown up in Amsterdam. Would I have been just as drawn to the lifestyle there as I was here in America?
So true,but we came close in the 60s.